Discovering is the activity of seeking out objects of research, research results, or other information which is useful in a given search perspective. Discovery includes very directed techniques such as advanced querying of databases, less directed techniques such as simple searching, and more serendipitous ones as browsing, which would include faceted browsing. (It is different from Information Retrieval, which is a structured way of extracting some piece of information or some specific subset of objects from a resource.)
The Closing the Gap in non-Latin script data aims at mapping the field of digital humanities projects outside and beyond the anglosphere with a particular focus on non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese in both machine-actionable and human readable form. The urgency and value of such a survey has been highlighted in recent discussions around global, decolonial, and multilingual digital humanities.
Introduction: One of the major challenges of digital data workflows in the Arts and Humanities is that resources that belong together, in extreme cases, like this particular one, even parts of dismembered manuscripts, are hosted and embedded in different geographical and institutional silos. Combining IIIF with a mySQL database, Fragmentarium provides a user-friendly but also standardized, open workspace for the virtual reconstruction of medieval manuscript fragments. Lisa Fagin Davis’s blog post gives contextualized insights of the potentials of Fragmentarium and how, as she writes, “technology has caught up with our dreams”.
OpenMethods Spotlights showcase people and epistemic reflections behind Digital Humanities tools and methods. You can find here brief interviews with the creator(s) of the blogs or tools that are highlighted on OpenMethods to humanize and contextualize them. In the first episode, Alíz Horváth is talking with Hilde de Weerdt at Leiden University about MARKUS, a tool that offers offers a variety of functionalities for the markup, analysis, export, linking, and visualization of texts in multiple languages, with a special focus on Chinese and now Korean as well.
East Asian studies are still largely underrepresented in digital humanities. Part of the reason for this phenomenon is the relative lack of tools and methods which could be used smoothly with non-Latin scripts. MARKUS, developed by Brent Ho within the framework of the Communication and Empire: Chinese Empires in Comparative Perspective project led by Hilde de Weerdt at Leiden University, is a comprehensive tool which helps mitigate this issue. Selected as a runner up in the category “Best tool or suite of tools” in the DH2016 awards, MARKUS offers a variety of functionalities for the markup, analysis, export, linking, and visualization of texts in multiple languages, with a special focus on Chinese and now Korean as well.
Introduction: The article illustrates the application of a ‘discourse-driven topic modeling’ (DDTM) to the analysis of the corpus ChronicItaly comprising several newspapers in Italian language, appeared in the USA during the time of massive migration towards America between the end of the XIX century and the first two decades of the XX (1898-1920).
The method combines both Text Modelling (™) and the discourse-historical approach (DHA) in order to get a more comprehensive representation of the ethnocultural and linguistic identity of the Italian group of migrants in the historical American context in crucial periods of time like that immediately preceding the eruption and that of the unfolding of World War I.
Introduction: The indispensable Programming Historian comes with an introduction to Term Frequency – Inverse Document Frequency (tf-idf) provided by Matthew J. Lavin. The procedure, concerned with specificity of terms in a document, has its origins in information retrieval, but can be applied as an exploratory tool, finding textual similarity, or as a pre-processing tool for machine learning. It is therefore not only useful for textual scholars, but also for historians working with large collections of text.
Introduction: The rperseus package provides classicists and other people interested in ancient philology and exegesis with corpora of texts from the ancient world (based on the Perseus Digital Library), combined with a toolkit designed to compare passages and selected words with parallels where the same expressions or words occur.
Introduction: This article explains the concept, the uses and the procedural steps of text mining. It further provides information regarding available teaching courses and encourages readers to use the OpenMinTeD platform for the purpose.
Introduction: How do we improve the quality of the fledgling practice of Web archeology, so much needed now that a first decade of Web information threatens to disappear as current interest wanes but contemporaneous cultural value is undisputed. A National Library of the Netherlands scientific report investigates.
Introduction: NeMO is a conceptual framework for DH. It offers a well-founded conceptualization of scholarly work, which can function as schema for a knowledge base containing information on scholarly research activity, including goals, actors, methods, tools and resources involved.